A young man is told a story that is passed down from generation to generation about a feud unlike any other the planet has ever seen. It began relatively insignificantly, as two men got in an argument over some unmarked animals. But it soon escalated to grander scales, as they fought for a woman's love, which ended with the woman's heart broken, twice due to the jealousy and pride of the men. They took their feelings with them to war, fighting on the same side, but also driven to live, to kill, and to survive to see the day that the other would fail. In the end, they were both caught, their throats slit, and their bodies used momentarily as objects of amusement for their captors. Sometimes the anger that is held within a person can lead to disastrous consequences if not alleviated hastily. The anger held by these two men for each other is what led them to their demise, even before they died. According to Buddha, "Holding on to your anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else, you are the one who gets burned".
The two characters constantly feuded with each other throughout the story. It began with some unmarked animals, and seeped into their daily lives. They held that anger within them, as they "crossed paths up in the mountains twice a day, though they never fought to the end." (158) It also seeped into their love life, as one man wooed a girl just for the fact that his rival had feelings for her. In the end, he let her go to his rival, and he in turn spent one night with her and decided that he would also let her go because he did not want leftovers. During the war, they fought alongside each other, but not once did they speak to each other. In the end, after they had lost the battle, the enemy had learned of the feud between two men, and he made a spectacle of it, a final rivalry for the two rivals. Their hatred finally died away in the end, the hatred they had "saved and stored up [because] it was their only possession in their coarse primitive lives.